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Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence
The Majdanek Concentration Camp, 1942â"1944
By Elissa Mailänder, Patricia Szobar Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2015 Michigan State University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-170-9
CHAPTER 1
Methodological and Theoretical Considerations
Why devote a study solely to female concentration camp staff? Although Nazi concentration camps have been the subject of much historical study, the SS is still not a major subject in concentration camp research. The first study of concentration camp staff was undertaken by Karin Orth, who employed a sociohistorical perspective to examine the male administrative elite within the camp. Orth has spurred new research into the history of perpetrators within the system of the concentration camp, but apart from the excellent study of Marc Buggeln, who combines structural history with a cultural historical perspective, this research continues to focus on structural causes rather than the violent behavior of the SS. Most of these recent studies concentrate on the SS elite who ran the camps. Apart from one study exploring female SS guards, "ordinary" concentration camp staff have, to date, received little attention. While there have been some biographical accounts of specific guards, and a rich historiography on postwar trials, a collective biography has yet to be written. At the same time, it is noteworthy that ordinary SS men attract only scant historical attention, while female guards, not least because of their gender and the "exotic" subject of female violence, which in most cases is not problematized, continue to garner a certain public interest. Except for Buggeln's work, lower-rank SS men remain invisible in scholarly literature. For this reason, the present study also seeks to pay particular attention to the male colleagues of the female Majdanek staff and the gender dynamics within the social framework of the camp.
Female Guards in Nazi Concentration Camps
The female SS guards entered the concentration camps relatively late, in 1938, joining a well-established and centralized administrative organization. The women's concentration camps were organized along similar lines as the men's camps. As was the case for men, the practice of Schutzhaft—or protective custody—served as the legal basis for committing women to the concentration camp. Issued by President Paul von Hindenburg on the same day as the Reichstag Fire (27 February 1933), the "Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and the State" legalized an indefinite term of detention that could be imposed by the executive authorities, entirely without judicial oversight. Even though the term "protective custody" was not mentioned in this decree, this legal measure soon became referred to as Schutzhaft. Conceived as a preventive legal measure, Schutzhaft required no court order and followed no set criteria, and so granted the police and Gestapo wide latitude in its implementation. The practice of protective custody, therefore, had nothing in common with the original meaning of the term "protective"—that is, detention for the protection of the individual in question. Initially, protective custody was imposed directly by the police on a local level. Beginning in 1934, however, the Gestapo gradually assumed control over the practice of Schutzhaft.
In the early 1930s, female detainees were held in existing prisons and concentration camps, in separate protective custody sections, which were not under the control of the SA (Sturmabteilung) or SS (Schutzstaffel). In March 1934, the first autonomous women's camp, the Moringen provincial workhouse (Provinzial-werkhaus), was set up in Prussia. Although Moringen also served as a detention center for women from other areas of the Reich, it was administered by the Hanover provincial government. At first, women there were guarded by the female staff of the workhouse, with auxiliary prison guards recruited from the local National Socialist Women's Organization (the NS Frauenschaft).
In March 1938, Heinrich Himmler ordered the establishment of the first centralized concentration camp for female inmates, which was placed under the administration of the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps (Inspektion der Konzentrationslager). It was located in Lichtenburg Castle near Prettin, on the Elbe River. In accordance with Himmler's orders, the daily guard duties at Lichtenburg were to be carried out only by women. As at Moringen, the guards were recruited from among female prison wardens and members of the National Socialist Women's Organization. In May 1939, the establishment of the central women's camp at Ravensbrück (also ordered by Himmler) marked the inauguration of a new phase of incarceration and also created a new type of female guard, the SS-Aufseherin—literally, the "SS overseer"—as they were called in official documents. These women occupied an intermediate status within the SS hierarchy. Like the SS men, they were civil service employees of the Reich (Reichsangestellte) and therefore under the legal jurisdiction of the SS. However, they were not themselves members of the SS; the only women granted membership in the "SS clan" were the wives, daughters, and sisters of members of the Schwarzer Orden ("Black Order"). As we have seen, the female guards were civilian employees of the paramilitary Armed SS, under the authority of the command staff headquarters, including the camp commandant and the higher SS leadership, all of which were positions staffed by men. On a day-to-day level, however, the Aufseherinnen had authority over the female inmates in the camp.
These guards were responsible for carrying out the daily roll call, assigning prisoners to labor detachments, and guarding women prisoners, both within the barracks area and at the prisoners' assigned place of work. As compared with the SS men, the female guards had only limited opportunities for advancement. "Upon demonstration of aptitude and ability," according to one official document, an Aufseherin might hope to be appointed head of a satellite camp (Nebenlager). The highest-ranking position for a woman in the concentration camp was the position of chief guard (Oberaufseherin), a rank equivalent to that of the camp compound leader (Schutzhaftlagerführer), the second-highest overall rank in the camp. The chief guard supervised the regular Aufseherinnen. Again, following the model of themen's camps, Ravensbrück had official camp regulations, written especially for the women's camp and based, largely, on the "Dachau model."
Until January 1941, Ravensbrück was the only concentration camp intended for female prisoners. Beginning with the occupation of Soviet territory in the fall of 1941, millions of Jewish and non-Jewish women deemed "racially inferior" or otherwise "undesirable" according to Nazi criteria came under German rule in the occupied East. The result was that, by the end of the war, thirteen women's Stammlager (main concentration camps) had been established, not including numerous satellite camps where female prisoners were also detained.
The Nazi administration distinguished between different types of concentration camps: the main camps, also called Stammlager, functioned as an independent entity and as the administration center (Verwaltungsstelle) for satellite camps (Nebenlager). With the exception of Ravensbrück, the main camps listed here did not exclusively house women. Instead, separate units for female prisoners were typically set up within established men's camps.
It is only possible to estimate the number of female guards who worked in the concentration camps between May 1939 and May 1945. The archives of the Ravensbrück Memorial contain the names and identifying details of 3,950 Aufseherinnen who worked at the central women's camp between May 1939 and May 1945, along with information on 2,639 salary accounts. Ravensbrück was not only the primary women's camp—until September 1944, it also served as the training camp for female guards. According to statistics maintained by the SS, as of January 1945 there were a total of 3,508 women working in concentration camps (as compared with 37,674 SS men). But in the somewhat hurried and chaotic circumstances of 1945, the statistics available for Ravensbrück do not include those women recruited near the end of the war. For this reason, it is likely that the total number of Aufseherinnen was in fact much higher than official records suggest. Although the number of female guards employed in the camps varied over time (due, in part, to fluctuations in the number of prisoners in the concentration camps), these numbers suggest that, in most camps, several dozen women worked alongside a much larger number of male guards. The exception to this rule was Ravensbrück, where female staff predominated.
One reason for the comparatively small number of Aufseherinnen is that women were employed to supervise inmates in concentration camps, but not in extermination camps. Although female guards did work at Auschwitz and Majdanek, this resulted from the dual function of these two camps, which both served, concurrently, as concentration and extermination camps.
The question as to why female staff were recruited to guard female prisoners has received relatively little scholarly attention. As a rule, it is attributed to the division between the sexes, customary in Germany at the time, in prisons as well as in many schools. The introduction of female guards, as initially ordered by Heinrich Himmler, may also have been an attempt to prevent sexual contact between SS men and female prisoners. Although little is known about the conditions under which female prisoners were held in the early SA camps, a number of cases of sexual harassment and attacks on female political prisoners by SS men have been documented for the SA camp in Hohenstein. It is likely that Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer SS (RFSS), wished to prevent excessive "contact" between SS men and imprisoned women, and that female guards were seen as less troublesome in this respect.
The concentration camp—a space dominated by men—offers a compelling setting in which to analyze questions of gender. In their function as female guards, these women moved into a militaristic sphere that was largely the province of men. Camps such as Majdanek, where female guards worked alongside a much larger contingent of male colleagues and superiors, offer a particularly useful context within which to consider questions of gender dynamics, including what role violence played in the interactions between male and female staff. For this reason, this study will incorporate a consideration of gender into its analysis of the relationship between power and violence at Majdanek, paying particular attention to questions of interaction, ambiguity, and change.
Alltagsgeschichte as Methodology
As Geoff Eley rightly pointed out in his recent reflection on the historiography of the Third Reich, scholarly approaches have changed significantly since the 1980s, when practitioners of Alltagsgeschichte such as Alf Lüdtke, Lutz Niethammer, Dorothee Wierling, and Adelheid von Saldern began to scrutinize the penetration of Nazi politics into everyday life and to theorize the social efficiency of Nazi ideology. This new approach to political history was empirically grounded, focused on local and concrete institutions (family, party organization, prison, workplace, and so forth) and on the people on the ground. Methodologically, it offered a new set of tools and a more nuanced understanding of the inner workings of the Third Reich, ultimately spurring a variety of new research. While macrohistorical studies on the Nazi economy and the Nazi state continue to attract the historian's attention, the sociohistorical, local perspective has challenged the established historiography and tapped into the energy of these forces from below. Alltagsgeschichte, or the history of everyday life, was among the historiographical impulses that brought the agency of ordinary people—that is, "the capacity of historical actors to act creatively and efficaciously in and on their immediate social worlds"—to the very center of discussions on the history of Nazism.
To explain the destruction wrought by the Third Reich, it was no longer sufficient to concentrate on Hitler's intentions, notorious ringleaders, and ideological fanatics (convinced Party members and blind followers). As Geoff Eley recently stated, "Once the compliance of wider social circles with Nazi policies was shown (civil servants, managers, businessmen, specialists and professionals of all kind), the responsibility of supposedly non-Nazi elites inevitably came on the agenda." In the words of historian Alf Lüdtke, such questions of everyday reality and everyday practices offer the "provocative possibility that it is not only individuals at the 'level of command' who become visible as historical actors." Within his focus on everyday practices, Lüdtke also linked modern warfare during the Second World War to industrial work, in effect putting the action of killing back in the center of the historical reflection. Indeed, allusions to work (division of labor, regularity of repetitious actions, professionalism, and so forth) allowed German Wehrmacht soldiers to normalize their actions and behavior. At the same time, however, a purely functionalist approach does not explain the massive violence. As Lüdtke explains, it was also "the intensity of terror and furor on the killing fields [that] enticed the soldiers to move beyond that very normalcy they longed for but also despised. It was this attraction of terror and furor that unsettled whatever claim soldiers (and bystanders) made that these actions were 'nothing but work.'"
For the purposes of analytical scholarship, however, violence is only indirectly accessible, either through firsthand portrayals of the experience of violence, or as secondhand accounts of observed acts of violence. Only in rare cases do we have direct access to acts of violence in the form of photographic or cinematic documentation. Methodologically, Alltagsgeschichte aims to gain insight into the experience of everyday life by triangulation, as it were, using a close reading of the different types of sources available to us. The benefit of this approach to perpetrator history is its ability to embrace different shades of power under Nazism (as authority, domination, rule, consent, participation, self-empowerment), and to overcome the usual binary divides between the public sphere, politics and ideology, and the lived experience of the everyday. Alltagsgeschichte, as practiced and developed by Alf Lüdtke, "turns the binary of coercion and consent into a dialectic." As Lüdtke has emphasized, power exerted by the state or by a political party only becomes effective within the constellation of interests and needs of the various social actors; this assertion proves equally true when the state possesses overwhelming power or even simply lays claim to omnipotence. "In this approach, power is an element within a 'field of action' in which those who are supposedly 'ruled' are anything but passive." Yet, as Eley has pointed out, this epistemological approach to Nazism has not become part of Holocaust historiography. Despite the almost innumerable studies on Nazi concentration camps, few—if any—have addressed the "everyday life" of either victims or perpetrators in the camps. As we will see, it is precisely in the everyday—or, more precisely, in everyday social practices—where ideological settings meet personal interests (private desires, professional identification with work, quotidian sociability, entertainment, family life) to enable historical agents not just to tolerate but to cooperate with the regime's demands.
Using the example of Majdanek and a group of twenty-eight guards, this study endeavors to examine how these women experienced their everyday work and life in a concentration and extermination camp, and more specifically, the role that violence played in that experience. Writing the everyday history of camp guards does not entail restoring missing historical subjects, but rather exploring the "subtleties and complexities of human agency." Research into everyday historical realities explores an "inner perspective" on the acquisition and exercise of power by the ordinary SS guards. This book thus opens a window onto three different exemplary (though not exhaustive) forms of concentrational and genocidal violence: extermination, physical ill-treatment, and cruelty. A microanalytical approach complements a macroanalytical perspective precisely because it offers insights into the "underside" of this institution—its incoherent, fractured, and shifting side, where multiple discourses and practices intersect. Rather than treating these phenomena as preexisting norms that are passively internalized and enacted, this approach analyzes the making, remaking, and unmaking of conventions in social practices. This microsocial and micropolitical perspective also compels scholars to recognize that institutions like concentration camps are also sites of labor: both in the metaphorical sense of places where we do work in the world, and in the literal sense of paid or unpaid employment in workplaces. Here, multiple agents encounter each other on a daily basis, acting and reacting with multiple intentions. But the microscopic and macroscopic perspectives are not actually distinct. By studying how the camp staff carry out their daily work and, in the process, contribute to building the institution of the concentration camp, we interrogate the rules, practices, objects, and spaces of everyday life that the agents themselves do not question. Consequently, as Paul Steege has emphasized, Alltagsgeschichte offers a way to integrate arguments about different layers of personal responsibility in and for Nazi rule.
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Excerpted from Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence by Elissa Mailänder, Patricia Szobar. Copyright © 2015 Michigan State University. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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